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As a result of new securities rules, you should be receiving annual statements from your investment advisers, showing how much you paid in dollars and cents for advice in 2016. It’s been called The Great Reveal.

Advisory fees can take a big chunk out of your retirement savings over the years. Is the service you get worth the cost? Are your investments growing quickly?

I like the idea of using passively managed index funds to get exposure to a wide variety of securities. They cost a fraction of what you pay for actively managed mutual funds.

Once you diversify your holdings with low-cost index funds, you can use some of your savings to buy stocks.

Is stock picking difficult? Do you need an MBA or undergraduate business degree to do it? No way.

I believe average people can succeed by reading a few books and newsletters, setting up a do-it-yourself brokerage account and using trial and error to develop their skills.

As someone who has managed my own investments for years, I hope to teach others how to do it. My online course at the University of Toronto starts March 1 and has six weeks of lessons.

Here’s a video where I describe the course, Called How to Value Companies & Pick the Right Stocks.

Please consider attending (the cost is $250) and spreading the word. I hope to see you online.

One of the best and simplest ways to begin rebuilding trust would be through a public apology. Since the program changes were announced, Air Miles has been quiet, letting the customer complaints pile up.

By acknowledging and owning their customers’ dissatisfaction, Air Miles could help re-establish their brand as one that understands and appreciates their customers.

An obvious fix would be to ‘make things right’ and exceed customers’ expectations with some kind of corrective action. This could be removing the policy, extending it or something similar.

Are you fed up with low interest rates? Want to learn how the stock market works, where to find reliable investment advice and what is required to trade stocks on your own?

Check out the popular investing course I’ve taught for the past decade at the University of Toronto’s school of continuing studies.

Classroom sessions start Sept. 8, from 7-9 pm, at Sidney Smith Hall (St. George St.) and run weekly to Nov. 3. There are no textbooks to buy or exams to write. The cost is $370 for nine weeks or about $40 per class.

My goal is to help you understand stocks, bonds, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, RRSPs and TFSAs. without bias, jargon or bafflegab. I also try to protect you from slick sales pitches, pitfalls and scams.

To sign up for Investing for Beginners, call 416-978-2400 or write to learn@utoronto.ca. You can also register online.

When you sign up with a lawn care company, you give it the freedom to bill for services you don’t receive — and to continue billing for the following year without your consent.

A reader told me about his experience with a company called TruGreen, beginning in 2014. Here’s his story.

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Our 100 foot frontage property is about 300 feet deep. We answered a “cold call” at the front door and met with a sales representative, who offered a no obligation quotation for weed control and fertilizer treatment.

I did a “walk about” of the whole property, pointing out the weeds that were stubborn and the parts that posed a particular challenge.

TruGreen was the only local company with equipment and hoses that could cover the entire property, the salesman said. He assured us a good response to fertilizing and weed control throughout the property.

Since he gave us a good price with a discount for prepayment, I signed a contract. Pretty soon, I noticed favourable results in the front area, but not at the rear.

Concerned that part of the property was not responding, I called to confirm that the whole property was treated each visit. I was suspicious because of a fine-print disclaimer on the invoice, saying that treatment was offered for a maximum of 3,000 square feet.

The whole property was being treated, I was told, adding that the company would put a special note on file to ensure that the technician did so.

In the end, after several conversations, TruGreen acknowledged that the whole property had not been receiving treatment, after all. The costs would be significantly higher than my contract specified if the whole property were to be treated.

I was not satisfied. Knowing of the continuous service language in the contract, including “your plan continues from year to year without any action on your part,” and “your plan will continue unless you contact us to cancel,” I made clear at the end of the season that I was cancelling the arrangement.

The following season, I was lucky enough to be at home when the technician arrived to begin treatment of my lawn for the second season. This happened despite my clear communication on the matter.

I noted that TruGreen was named in several press articles surrounding billing practices, such as this one in The Record.

Now that spring has arrived, consumers can expect any number of cold calls from roofing, window, eavestrough, siding and pool contractors, as well as lawn services. We need to be vigilant and protect ourselves with measures such as the following:

* Secure all understandings in writing, signed by a service representative who is authorized to bind the service.

* Review and act, as needed, on all the contract terms including contractor provisions for “continuous service” and customer cancellation privileges.

* Take special note of waivers and guarantees.

* Look for professional credentials and memberships (TruGreen has not been a member of Landscape Ontario, for example).

* As much as possible, monitor the service and be satisfied that you receive the service you contracted for.

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Great advice and thanks to the reader for sharing his experience, to which I will add a final point.

You have 10 days under Ontario law to cancel contracts signed at your door. Use this cooling off period to do your research and pull the plug on lawn care contracts with big holes in them.

Adam Mayers of the Toronto Star wrote about bank fees going up again. When he asked readers how they felt, 88 per cent said their bank fees were too high.

He suggested five ways to reduce them:

Go into your branch and ask. It’s the best way to figure out if you’re paying too much based on how you bank. The more business you have with the bank, the better the deal should be.

If you’re a student or your kids are students, a no-fee deal should be available.

Those over 60 should expect discounts, but not freebies. There are too many people in the demographic now to expect something for nothing. TD’s basic discount, for example, is 25 per cent for this group.

Many fee-free options relate to minimum balances in your account. If you keep a large sum in a savings account that is earning next to nothing, consider moving that cash to a chequing account. The fee savings may more than offset the interest earned.

Branch out. A credit union or low-fee option like PC Financial, Tangerine and EQ Bank can work for some of your needs.

Michael, a Toronto Star reader, grew tired of facing increases in TD’s minimum balance required to avoid fees. So, he moved to online bank Tangerine. Here is his story.

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My wife and I were frustrated with TD’s ever-increasing minimum balances. We made a few attempts to argue that our $100+ a week mortgage interest outweighed the $11 a month service fee we were paying on our chequing account (since we were challenged to maintain the new $3,000 minimum).

Since we didn’t get anywhere, we made the bold leap to Tangerine Bank. There were two reasons for the switch:

1. The large majority of our banking is done online. We make infrequent branch visits (generally, to renegotiate the mortgage or to buy U.S. cash for bi-yearly trips south) and we did not believe we should be paying $11 for what was perceived as a subsidy for branch staffing.

2. Tying up $3,000 as a cost-avoidance method made no financial sense to us.

While our experience in changing banks was fairly smooth, it did have some moments of frustration.

· With Tangerine being an online-focused service, working through the mortgage transfer involved a few ‘real’ people. Communication between these people was not always great and we had a couple of moments wondering if the transaction was processing properly.

· Tellers at TD could not perform some of the transactions (mostly to do with transferring and closing our trading accounts), which meant we had to revert back to online and over-the-phone transactions.

· Transferring preauthorized payments began smoothly. Tangerine has a robust ‘switch assistant’ and a couple went without hitch (utilities mostly). Others involved going directly to the payee and updating the database personally.

We were thrilled when it was all complete and we were actually paid interest ($0.26!) at the end of the first month. This was a novel concept with a chequing account, but a satisfying one!

If you feel the increasing fees and minimum balances are outrageous, I urge you to investigate moving to one of the growing number of alternative banking solutions.

The big banks should all be taking notice, as I am sure more Canadians will be choosing these online options (with in-branch affiliations), especially given our penchant to embrace online and mobile tools.

Here is a guest post from Alfred Yang, a co-founder of a new website aimed at helping parents plan for the bills when their kids reach college or university.

How a Small Team is Helping Canadians Plan Finances for Post-Secondary Education

By Alfred Yang

I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in the year 2000. Without a doubt, my post-secondary education gave me an edge in the job market and opened up incredible career opportunities.

Today, the financial barrier to the same credential is much higher. Annual tuition for the engineering program has gone up from $4,500 in the year 2000 to over $13,000 in 2016. For a four year program, that’s a whopping $52,000.

To put it another way, this amounts to an annual increase of over 7%, well beyond the rate of inflation. If you add living expenses and school supplies, the cost becomes even more alarming.

Today, the average new grad from university or college owes $28,000 in student debt. Canada’s outstanding student loan balance has been steadily climbing in the past two decades and there are no signs of it going in the opposite direction.

While I can’t do much about rising costs, I joined forces with Aly Hirji and Scott Moore to build awareness and encourage sound financial planning.

The cost of the engineering program I described is just one example. Everyone’s situation is different and we want to find a way to help Canadians on a more personal level. That’s why we created Proliteracy.ca.

Proliteracy.ca is a tool that forecasts the cost of post-secondary education and helps students and parents plan finances accordingly.

Let’s say you have 10-year-old daughter who is fascinated by animals. You think she may want to study life science one day. You want to give her the best shot at attending a great post-secondary institution.

But even with that goal in mind, there are a number of crucial questions that need to be answered:

– How much money do you need to be saving?

– What is the cost difference between studying locally and out of province?

– What financing options besides the family’s savings are available?

– If a student loan is required, what kind of financial burden will that create for my child?

Proliteracy.ca is designed to help. It starts by asking you a few simple questions, then makes predictions on tuition, cost of living and expenses, based on historical data.

The end result is a good estimate of the financial target you or your family should be aiming for when planning for post-secondary education.

Our team also wants to build awareness of the many funding options available, including the Canadian Learning Bond (CLB) and Canadian Education Savings Grant (CESG), and the impact they have on your overall RESP savings.

We are building up a database of scholarships, student aid services and borrowing vehicles. We hope Proliteracy.ca can become an end-to-end tool to help Canadians create a strong financial plan for post-secondary education.

Since our pilot launch in October, we’ve received a lot of feedback. We’ve seen a desire to understand trends in the job market to assist with decisions on academic studies.

We know that university or college is not the only path to a fulfilling career, so we are looking into adding forecasts for trades and apprenticeships.

While our team is making great strides towards these objectives, we can get there a lot faster by working with individuals and organizations who share the same passion for educating students and families.

Next Monday (Nov. 30), I’ll be the keynote speaker at Toronto’s financial learning forum. It is a free half-day event, featuring workshops on tax and financing for small business, repaying student loans and qualifying for benefits.

I want to spotlight the Investor Be Aware video contest, run by the Small Investor Protection Association to show the hidden dangers of dealing with financial advisers. Here is a link to the three winning YouTube videos.

Finally, many statistical studies are released this month, designed to show the level of Canadians’ financial capability. Here is one of the most interesting surveys sent to me.

You want to call a big company, but you can’t reach a real person who can resolve your problem. Welcome to the modern world.

It’s a common dilemma in an age of automated phones with multiple menu options. Most of the time, you get a recording and a long wait on hold, accompanied by messages to use the company’s website to get better service.

Going online is not always a solution. Sometimes, you really want to speak to someone and tell your story, rather than using a live chat at a website.

If you find it impossible to get through to some firms, you can try a website called Get Human. When calling Apple, for example, you can find the quickest way to reach a real person.

Now I’ve learned of another website, 800 Numbers.net, which has a few Canadian toll-free numbers. Here is how to get through to Air Canada— a company whose phone numbers are always a challenge for customers to find — and TD Bank.

“The numbers are accompanied by written transcriptions of the company phone menus, so that users can get what the help they need quickly,” says Webmaster Melissa Clark.

It is great to know that such services exist. They are breaking through the deep, dark channels of corporate communication and making it easy for customers to talk to their suppliers.

Felix Salmon’s articles at Fusion continue on a contrarian track. In a Aug. 24 piece, “Three cheers for the plunging stock market,” he emphasized that the economy is going to be fine even if the market goes down.

The stock market is NOT the economy. Instead, it’s a measure of wealth, showing how rich rich people are.

“If the rich are getting a little bit poorer, that’s fine. It means reduced inequality and an ever so slightly more level playing field for everybody else.”

Do you want to learn about investing? My nine-week course at University of Toronto starts Sept. 10. To sign up for the Thursday night sessions, go to Continuing Studies and search for Investing for Beginners.

Here is a guest post from Annie Gelfand, a life coach who has has success in resolving her own consumer issues. I’m posting a summary here and her expanded tips in the comments below.

In today’s automated and web connected world, it is getting more challenging for consumers to resolve product and service-related issues.

Call centres are now the “go to” customer service solution. However, dealing with a call centre is time consuming and can leave you frustrated and ready to tear your head off. What is a consumer to do?

I have had some success in resolving my own problems. So, let me share my step-by-step consumer satisfaction process:

STEP ONE: ESCALATE. Move your complaint up to a supervisor or team leader.

STEP TWO: KNOW THE COMPETITION. Research other options.

STEP THREE: FIND OUT WHO THE MOVERS AND SHAKERS ARE. You have to be diligent to find the phone numbers and who’s who at corporate headquarters.

STEP FOUR: USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO SHAME THEM. If all else fails, find the company’s Twitter and Facebook pages and POLITELY post your comments.